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Galileo And Cassini Team Up
Bearpaw writes, "Trying to squeeze the last possible bit of use out of Galileo, NASA may team it up with the Saturn-bound Cassini for a joint mission. " The two will be perform some joint observations of the Jupiter system, as well as doing separate missions on the Jupiter system, including Ganymede as well. Hats off to the folks behind Galileo, whose official mission ended in 1997, but has kept on going.
Wonder if the two spacecraft will be able to get any stero photographs. Preferably Jupiter and a moon or two.
Or will the differences in their respective distances from Juptier be too great? For good stereo, the two cameras should be "close" together w/ respect to the subject(s), and roughly the same distance away.
Hey! Don't forget Pioneer 10. He just got a new lease on life. Not to bad for our oldest semi-functioning space probe.
Rocks?
Quoting the Author's Note from Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, "Finally, there is the strange case of the 'Eye of Japetus'- Chapter 35 of 2001. Here I describe Astronaut David Bowman's discovery on the Saturnian moon of a curious feature, '...a brilliant white oval, about four hundred miles long and two hundred wide ... perfectly symmetrical ... and so sharp-edged that it almost looked ... painted on the face of the little moon.' As he came closer, Bowman convinced himself that 'the satellite was a huge empty eye staring back at him as he approached...' Later, he noticed 'the tiny black dot at the exact center' which turns out to be the monolith (or one of its avatars.) Well, when Voyager 1 transmitted the first photographs of Iapetus they did indeed disclose a large, clear-cut white oval with a tiny black dot at the center. Carl Sagan promptly sent me a print from the JPL with the cryptic annotation 'Thinking of you...' I do not know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Voyager 2 has left the matter open." Personally, im anxious to see if this black dot is a real feature, or if its merely a few missing bits like the images of the "face" on mars is. thought fellow slashdotters might get a kick out of reading that though, especially those who havent been religious about their Clarke recently.
Van Allen belts baby! Yup, the same things that grab charged particles and create the northern lights here on Earth. Jupiter's belts are correspondingly larger and therefore grab a greater number of energetic particles and guide them into a shell around the planet. I think anywhere within the first two Galilean satellites is a pretty dangersous place.
the way they used to.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
Is is at all possible that perhaps a space probe could be positioned in such a way that perhaps when and if the power would be lost that the vehicle could return to earth gracefully? Then all you would have to do is retool it and launch it again. That would make for an interesting concept and allow for more data to be gathered much more cheaply.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Trying to squeeze the last possible bit of use out of Galileo
My first thought when I read this? "I hope they don't expect too much, he's been dead for several hundred years..."
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
With all the media attention on the failures of NASA, it's good to see NASA's great successes: Cassini, Galileo, Voyager, Pathfinder, Viking, and most of all Apollo. When people talk about cutting the NASA budget, we can point them to these; and when they ask, "Yeah, but what did it do to save the environment," you can ask them, "How much are you willing to pay for knowledge that isn't immediately useful?"
Finding God in a Dog
With all of NASA's rotten luck lately watch 'em crash into each other. Or just disappear..._ ________
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I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.
Next time NASA crashes a probe, or blows up a rocket on a launch pad, remember Galileo. When NASA gets bad press because it keeps throwing money away, remember Galileo. When someone wonders why the government spends money on NASA, remember Galileo. And while we may not get Tang from Galileo, I know there's a kick ass group of guys who built an unstopable, juggernaught of a probe. I think they called her Galileo.
What can I say, I have a soft spot for space exploration. Hehehe.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
So we can finally discover the 2nd monolith... (the first one's on the Moon).
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
NASA is cool even though they've had some failures lately.
You'd have some failures too if you were being mandated to take the lowest bid on equipment that is being sent off to alien environments. If NASA had just spent the extra money up front on the first Mars mission, we wouldn't be having the Martian problems.
Back to the topic, though... It's awesome that NASA is getting extra use out of a probe that was supposed to be written off three years ago. Hopefully, this joint mission will help us in our endeavour to better understand our solar system (which should give us a better idea of how the gazillion other ones out there work, too).
djx.
the only trail worth taking is the one you blaze yourself
This one is pretty cool.
-ac
The spacecraft has already endured nearly three times the radiation it was designed to withstand, but repeated exposure to Jupiter's radiation has taken its toll.
What I don't understand is - what can radiation really do to the Galileo? I know the radiation we deal with on Earth is a whole different story then open space radiation, or the radiation around Jupiter.
I could see it cause a memory fault, or cause a bad computation with the CPU/chipsets somehow. But I know Galileo has got redundant memory/CPU that would detect errors and recompute. Worse case, it would knock itself into "Safe Mode"; reseting itself to a safe status.
What kind of "real" damage could radiation do that would shorten the life of Galileo?
Jeremy
Jeremy
"Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one..."
some positive news for NASA. I've become tired of seeing negative press about NASA, people complain about things like they could do any better. Whenever I hear someone bad-mouthing NASA I point Galileo out to them, functioning well dispite being three years past it's operational parameters, same with the Pioneers and Voyagers. I'm really hoping Cassini will be a huge success so the Pluto project will perk some eyebrows and hopefully get launched.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Whoa, there! Since I work for the company who's fault it would be if it wasn't nasa's, I've kind of been paying attention. I've been led to believe that both of the problem's were actually nasa's fault, not the contractors.
Poor communications both times, I think. Not that the nasa guys don't rock (smarter than me, at least), just don't run around blaming my employer for bad things it didn't do. There are enough bad things it has actually done. ;)
And about the lowest bid thing -- I'm not sure what the actual rules are, but I think to some extent you take the best bid -- i.e. cost is a factor, but not the only one. Contractors don't just submit a cost to the gov., they submit a amazingly large document (a proposal) about how they plan to do everything.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
I thought that they were thinking of crashing Galileo so it wouldn't contaminate any of the moons (esp. Europa/Io).
They still are, it's in the article.
Yes, it's great to hear good news coming from NASA. I think that they should re-hire and un-retire the folks who churned out Voyager and Galileo for the next Mars probe. It seems the older crowd were more hands-on oriented and the newer guys more theory-oriented.
Well, the fact that the older guys had 10 times as much money to spend on Galileo, Voyager and Viking probably has something to do with it too.
Why not slingshot Galileo back to Mars? It's old, it's not the most technologically-advanced hunk of metal floating around, but by Gawd it works!
It probably doesn't have enough reaction mass to get to Mars, once your delta-vee is gone, you can't change your orbit.
George
Dang clever these Earthings...
I'm glad that someone at NASA thought of teaming up on observations. The results should be even more spectacular than NASA expects. When reviewing code, multiple reviewers going over the code at the same time produces an effect greater than the sum of their findings - stuff that one reviewer finds will spark a connection for another, and so on. They called it the "Phantom Reviewer" effect back when I was taught about formal reviews.
The same thing will happen for NASA - each of the probes will be gathering data in different spectrum, from different angles, at the same time. They expect to gain a lot from this, but I think it will exceed their expectations many times over. Though, the results will take a couple of years to be seen (it takes a long time to crunch a lot of data). I'm looking forward to seeing what the atrophysicists (sp?) can deduce from it all. We could be in for a few big surprises.
Just to be fair, I think I need to speak up.
I believe that you unjustly blame the current President for the failure of NASA. If anybody is to be blamed, it should be the American people. As a whole (not just the scientific/computer community), NASA does not have as much support as say education or National Defense. Because of this NASA has had a shrinking budget since President Johnson's term in office. This decrease in budget lasted all the way through till two years ago. Fiscal Year 1999 (which started in October 1998) is the first year in 30 years (since FY 1968) where NASA's budget has not decreased.
Also, the current administrator of NASA, Dan Goldin, has been the administrator since Spring of 1992, which was during President Bush's term in office.
I don't mean to sound like a like I am defending President Clinton, but I don't think the problem lies there. Must people in the Space Industry tend to lay blame for NASA's failures on the feet of Mr. Goldin, who invented the "Faster, Cheaper, Better" plan. All the projects in the last few months that have failed (specifically, Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander) were built under the Faster,Cheaper, Better. The first project, Mars Pathfinder, was also FBC, but it was a very successful mission. But to be fair to Mr. Goldin, FCB was invented because of the loss of the Mars Observer (which cost $900 M) which was a typical science mission (and lost in 1993).
We must use facts in defending (and sometimes blaming) NASA, not demagoguery.
The contrast between Galileo's success and the recent tragic failures of the Mars probes is striking, and informative. While NASA administrator Dan Goldin's "faster, cheaper, better" mantra played well for congress what it really meant was that deep space exploration was stretched even thinner than it had been. Galileo had an adequate budget, that allowed for actually checking out the spacecraft before launch. A budget big enough budget that enough quality ground control was available to make the recovery from the antenna fault possible
The recent Mars missions had a third the staff for three times the probes compared to the last series of Mars probes (the immensely popular pathfinder.) Is it any wonder that drastically understaffed and underfunded projects experienced failures? They didn't even have enough money to install equipment to transmit telemetry that would have allowed NASA to determine what caused the Polar lander's failure.
On a long duration mission millions of miles from home, redundancy is a critical issue. This takes at least a little bit of money. The only time that redundancy on individual probes can be discounted is when they are very simple and there are a lot of them. There have been proposals of this kind, largely ignored by NASA.
If you want successful space probes, give NASA the resources it needs to do the job. And don't throw billions away on the space shuttle. If we wanted a private space industry, it would take one thing: the announcement that the government was taking bids on a SSTO, in quantity, and that excess vehicles could be used by private industry.
You'd have to stand back to avoid being hit by an entire new industry. Like with aviation in the early part of this century, gov't can play a part by doing research and creating an initial need to be met by private industry. (Early military and mail service contracts.) Once its started- and the banks assured that the companies will make money- you're off and running. Airplanes were soon being produced for cargo and passengers, and now the airline industry is a multi-multi-billion/year industry.
When NASA was NACA, it did this well. Nasa should go back to its roots, do great research, but leave business to business.
Save a tree. Eat a beaver.